If you enjoy tech, then you probably have a pile of old stuff that’s not completely useless, but you don’t have a use for. They aren’t worthless, but you don’t use them any more so they’ll just sit around until they find their way into the trash.

For myself, after doing a bunch of PC upgrades with r/buildapcsales during the holiday season, I had an extra GPU and CPU. Since they were budget components, I knew that they’d become more irrelevant as time went on.

Talking with some friends, they suggested checking out r/homelab. In short, it’s about people who’re enthusiastic about home networking and geeking out about self hosting whatever they can.

Looking at what I had, a Home Theater PC seemed like a good idea, but I’m not much for gaming, and I spend more time at my desk than on the couch. I’ve really enjoy Virtual Box and Vagrant for simple headless VMs, but I didn’t like leaving my PC on while I’m away. So I decided that a VM server would be an reasonable goal.

I looked at a few hypervisors, but they were all too complicated for my simple usage. Looking around more, KVM with Kimchi seemed simple enough, by having a simple web server to provision machines.

As of now it’s just sitting under my TV, humming away. I’ve left it off for extended periods if I don’t have anything planned. Partly for power bill reasons, and partly for the longevity of the fans. But overall I’ve been able to make experimenting easier, and utilize hardware I already own.